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28th October 2025
We went to see The Long Walk at the cinema a few weeks ago, and saw the trailer for the upcoming reboot of The Running Man at the same time. Both films are based on early novels by Stephen King: The Long Walk from 1967 (published in 1979) and The Running Man from 1972 (published in 1982) — each appearing under King’s pseudonym, Richard Bachman. (It makes me smile to think of King writing darkly political works about walking and running in roughly the same period.)
Donald Wollheim, editor at Ace Books, returned the manuscript of The Running Man to King with a note that has become the stuff of rejection legend: “We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell.”
To which I’d be inclined to say: who are you trying to kid, Donald? Show me a utopia that’s NOT negative!
As far as I can tell, any utopian world or society will always have someone in it who finds life not much to their advantage or liking. Even Houhynhnm Land, the seemingly wonderful home of the sentient and reasoning horses in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, has its own discontented population in the form of the Yahoos, the primitive “brutes in human form” obsessed with digging “pretty stones” out of the mud, simmering with poorly directed resentment towards their equine mistresses and masters.
The word dystopia has been around for way longer than I realised — since 1868, in fact, when the economist and philosopher John Stuart Mill coined it to criticise British land policy in Ireland. (The word utopia has been around even longer, since 1516, when Sir Thomas More used it as the name for his imaginary island with a perfect society and politics, but I doubt I’m telling you anything you didn’t already know there.)
Utopia plays on the close similarity between the Greek words for good (“eu”) and not (“ou”), teasing with hints of some kind of worldly paradise, but hinting more darkly at a vision of perfection that’s doomed never to materialise — a literal nowhere place. By contrast, we never need to look very far to see endless variations of dystopia playing out right under our noses.
And the fact is, I think Wollheim was plain wrong on the book sales front. Well, maybe he was somewhat right to say what he said in early Eighties America, but his statement clearly holds no water in 2025 (which, delightfully, is the very year in which The Running Man is set.)
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is shifting in sizeable numbers again — curious, isn’t it, how both periods of Trump’s presidency should spark renewed interest in a work which addresses threats to the liberties, bodies and reproductive rights of women? I doubt that George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has ever stopped selling. And I’d be willing to bet the lesser known Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here has had a resurgence of late, too.
Even more interesting, I think, is the extent to which dystopia has become big business in the Young Adult market — I’m thinking of obvious works like Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games series or James Dashner’s The Maze Runner books. Even more interesting still, and I’m sure I won’t be the first person to speculate on this, is what correlation there might be around this appetite for dystopian fiction amongst people in supposedly the most anxious generation of human beings ever to exist.
Whether these works help to corroborate doom-laden worldviews or function as a catharsis for them, I suppose only time will tell.
SPOILER ALERT: I’m about to indicate what happens at the end of The Running Man, so if you don’t want to find out, look away now. (Plus, I very much doubt the new film will stick to this version of the story, anyway…)
If you’re still with me, though…
Bev Vincent, in her 2015 article Can You See Me Running, picks up on exactly the kind of bleakly prescient visionary quality that distinguishes some of the very finest examples of dystopian fiction:
The novel’s ending foreshadows real-world events that would take place two decades after the book was published and three decades after it was written (King states in one interview that it was published with virtually no changes to his original manuscript). Crashing a hijacked plane into a skyscraper is, according to King, the Richard Bachman version of a happy ending.
This is precisely why I’ll always love (and happily buy) books about negative utopias. You never know when you’ll read something that proves itself to be grimly, magnificently prophetic within your own lifetime. The thrill and the terror of that possibility are reverse sides of the same coin. The dystopianists look and extrapolate and dare to imagine; we overlook them, and publishers decline to publish them, at our peril.